Monday, November 05, 2012

Stories below the fold

Malala update: The story is fading in Pakistan...because the Taliban is threatening reporters who cover it.

The 15 year old Malala
Yousufzai is now in Britain, along with her family, to receive better
care and protection from Taliban threats to hunt her down and finish the
job. The Taliban are now boasting that they will go after another
teenage girl (who has been given police protection) who has also been
outspoken about female education. The Pakistani Taliban insists they
have the right to kill women who criticize Islamic radical ideas. The
Taliban responded to the media uproar over the Malala Yousufzai shooting
by declaring war on journalists (especially foreign ones) and promising
murder attempts against the most troublesome journalists.

In Saudi
Arabia, where infidel churches (and open practice of other religions)
are forbidden, outright hatred of infidels is widely preached.

The dirty little secret is that there are a million Christian foreign workers in Saudi who have no church to worship in...

which is why that truck explosion in Saudi that killed 11 and hurt 124 people killed...most reports mention "some foreigners" were injured, but our local press notes that one Filipino was killed and at least 11 injured, meaning ten percent of the dead were Pinoys; quotes in other articles quote a Pakistani who was injured and his brother killed, so I wonder if most of the dead in the factory are the "invisible" foreign workers...

Reminds me of my aunt.. she was often left alone in her bed at her nursing home, and often when my mom would come to visit and she would be deep in a wakeful dream of past times...when my mom "woke" her, she knew it was a waking dream, and immediately came to reality. My Objibwe patients said this was because the sick and elderly could go to the other side...we called it "seeing ghosts", and the "cure" was to hold frequent prayer services and burn sage....only when the halluciantions were frightening did we treat it with medication.

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Maybe there should have been another "mutiny on the Bounty": some question what the Captain was doing sailing out in the storm. The article notes that he insisted that the ship was safer in the ocean when there is a storm, but the writer of the article sarcastically points out a ship at sea needs people on it.

so let us remember the Coast Guard personnel who risked their lives to rescue these clueless people:

By now another Coast Guard airplane had arrived to replace the first one
on the scene and was soon followed by an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter,
piloted by Lt. Cmdr. Steve Cerveny and Lt. Jane Peña, and carrying Mr.
Haba, the rescue swimmer, and Mike Lufkin, a hoist operator. In the dark
sea below, they saw broken bits of brightness: the locator lights on
the rafts and survival suits....

Soon Mr. Haba was swimming to one of the life rafts and identifying
himself to the huddled survivors as, simply, the Coast Guard. Soon Mr.
Lufkin was hoisting other Bounty crew members — two, three, four, five —
into the Jayhawk. With fuel levels dropping, the Jayhawk then flew back
to land, while another Coast Guard rescue crew picked up nine more
people.

What separates barbarism from civilization? About 96 hours without power, it turns out.

A very good essay, and if you are a tree hugger that thinks living in simplicity is easy and that getting rid of "modern conveniences" would lead to utopia, maybe you should read the essay and rethink reality.

That's not true here in the Philippines: we have so many brownouts that most middle class folks and small businesses own generators, and when the water supply went bust, we put our hose outside for our poorer neighbors without deep wells and pumps to fill up their containers...everyone has candles, and most folks kept in touch via cellphones, which could be recharged at CVC supermarket next door for a nominal fee...

Of course, we never ran out of diesel for the generator, which helps...nor do we have guns (only dogs and machetes)...and if worse came to worse, we'd move to the farm (as Lolo and his mom did when the Japanese invaded)...

By Saturday afternoon Rooney was over her
disappointment and looking forward to a charity run on hard-hit Staten
Island that she had found advertised on the Internet.

On Sunday, Rooney planned to run with a backpack full of dog food, cat
food, batteries and some water donated by her hotel, the Ritz-Carlton
across from Central Park."I truthfully at this point don't care if I run. I just want to give this stuff out," she said.

So she has stuff folks needs, is staying in a hotel room that is probably better used to house refugees from unheated tenements, but hey, she finally will get the chance to give away a couple of batteries and cans of dog food...

...Tuesday morning the city’s churches assembled to begin relief
efforts. Hope for New York, a nonprofit affiliate of Redeemer
Presbyterian Church, is helping coordinate relief efforts between
churches and nonprofit groups, posting needs on its website (hfny.org/hurricane).
All Angels Church on the Upper West Side requested hygiene kits and
blankets. New York City Relief asked for clothing and food. Other
churches in Queens sent out foot patrols to check on their neighbors...